Henry Steele Commager

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Henry Steele Commager (born October 25, 1902 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , † March 2, 1998 ) was an American historian .

Life

Commager graduated from the University of Chicago with a doctorate in 1930. His teachers there included the expert in colonial history, Marcus W. Jernegan , and the specialist in US constitutional history, Andrew C. McLaughlin . From 1930 he taught at New York University , from 1936 at Columbia University and then until his retirement in 1992 at Amherst College .

In The American Mind , he describes the development of liberalism in the USA from the 1880s to the 1940s. Politically, he was also a liberal: he supported Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s , was an opponent of McCarthy in the 1950s, supported Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy , campaigned for the civil rights movement (he supported, among other things the African-American historian John Hope Franklin, speaking at the Southern Historical Association ) and was later a critic of the Vietnam War and of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan .

He wrote some history textbooks widely used in the United States with Samuel Eliot Morison and his colleague at Columbia University Allan Nevins . Further books were devoted to intellectual history of the 18th century (Age of Enlightenment ) in the USA (The Empire of Reason) and he wrote a biography of Theodore Parker .

He was the editor of the Documents of American History collection , first in 1938 and for the tenth edition in 1988. In 1952 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Fonts

  • with Samuel Eliot Morison The Growth of the American Republic , Oxford University Press, 1930, 7th edition 1980, revised and abridged edition 1983 with William E. Leuchtenburg as A Concise History of the American Republic
  • Documents of American History , 1934
  • Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader , 1936, online
  • with Allan Nevins Readings in American History , 1939
  • Majority Rule and Minority Rights , 1943
  • The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s , Yale University Press 1950
  • Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent , 1954, online
  • The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiography , 1965
  • Freedom and Order: A Commentary on the American Political Scene , 1966
  • The Defeat of America: War, Presidential Power, and the National Character , 1974
  • Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment , 1976
  • The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment , Doubleday 1977
  • Commager on Tocqueville , University of Missouri Press, 1993

literature

  • Neil Jumonville: Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present , The University of North Carolina Press, 1999

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members: Henry Steele Commager. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 23, 2019 .